Long Day

I left on train this morning at 7:00, was back at Richmond at 7:00 tonight to go home.
Station first announces that train is delayed. I check the website, announced delay of 1.5 hours. About 20 minutes later, web site says who knows when it'll show.

I called long suffering LEWJ (who really should be done with me..) and ask for a ride. (from Richmond!) She agrees, of course, because that's how we roll.

I offer the two extra seats to fellow strandees and one turns out to be running friend of Ed and Steve... (and friend of LEWJ and acquaintance of mine. Now friend again... :-) )

And I got home and just updated a client as promised.

We Think Locally And So We Don't Act Globaly.

I had another fun run today, with RadioLab as my guide.

Earlier this month I mentioned that I had fallen across some stats about traffic fatalities. My hope in using that discovery is to make a (brief) case for public transit as a public health remedy.  The question is, how many of the (not quite) 40,000 people who die in the US each year could be saved if we had a vibrant public transit system.

Underlying that question (but unexpressed at the time) is the problem of why we can rally as a nation and go off to war after 3,000 people die in the attacks of Sept. 11, but can't muster the same resolve to attack problems that claim a much larger number of casualties.

We know the answer intuitively. The world stops for Baby Jessica. There seems to be something about how we're wired that leads us to follow more dramatic peril.

And that's where RadioLab comes in, with an episode unfortunately titled "Killing Babies, Saving the World." You should listen to it, but the intro paragraph explains the title. And the premise is that global concerns are a relatively recent phenomena in human evolution. We just aren't wired to care about the big picture.

The other episode I listened to is called "New Normal".  One of the interesting points (which was really a side point) was that Stalin wasn't a fan of evolution.  So, Stalin and the 44% of Americans who think we are today as God created us however many years ago are on the same side. I kinda like that. I wonder if Stalin got a flu shot. But as always, I digress. The main point of the New Normal is that we can change and sometimes for the better. But they use primates as one example (and foxes as another), so you'd have to believe in evolution to have hope.

Thanksgiving

The day started with a 10k, Run To Feed The Hungry. 30,000 of my closest friends came out for the 5k or 10k.

What you have to understand is that Sacramento is more than willing to shut down major streets to accommodate a run. It's pretty cool.

Here are some random shots:

The run went right by LEWJ's, so I had a hospitable Bio break location. Plus breakfast, courtesy of Lilah, after.

Up and Running With A New Mac.

A few weeks ago I broke the screen on my laptop. I immediately pinged some friends at Apple to see what the current friends and family discounts looked like.  I also started looking at the Craigslist ads.

Within a day or two I found someone selling a current generation MacBook Pro 15" for about $500 below list and about $650 below the out the door cost. Hmm. Not so cheap that I think it's hot, but a real good deal. And, cheaper than the smaller laptop I was thinking about getting from Apple.

I then spent a week and a half trying to connect with the fellow and today, finally, I was successful.

Now that I have the thing, I needed to copy all my data and settings from my old Mac to the new one. 

Apple makes something called the Migration Assistant.  Very cool. All your documents, Applications (aside from the 'built-in' apps, which aren't touched.), settings, passwords,  etc. are just copied over from one Mac to the other.

Here's how the evening went.

1) Wipe drive on new Mac, install current OS. (10.6)
2) While the install is happening, go for a run. (No prompts in the middle of the install were waiting for me when I got back. They ask you everything up front…)
3) Start Migration Assistant. You're prompted to do this after a fresh OS install. I used one of my backup drives which was a clone of the Mac hard drive.
4) While that migration is happening, I go to dinner, pick Molly up at the train station, run to Fry's to get a FireWire 800 − 400 cable and come back.
5) Install software updates to get Mac to version 10.6.2

All done. My total time at the computer managing all this was 20 minutes. Total time to get it all done was about three hours.

So far all the primary programs I use are humming along without a problem. There are a few minor glitches - the Mac isn't seeing the AppleTV. And I forgot to deauthorize the old Mac with iTunes. But basically, I'm up and running.

Now, a few months ago I swore I wouldn't do this again. The downside to this migration is you're bringing over a lot of cruft from years past. But I don't have a week to mess around with this stuff, so I took the easy way out.